Putting Out The Fire: On Burnout

I have finally gotten out the second article of Professional-ish out (which you're reading right now), and I'll say that I'm not too happy about the length of time between articles. Since this blog is new, it feels as if I failed before I even started, in a way.

With that said, maybe there's a lesson here that I can gleam from this, and hopefully, my readers can also gain something useful here as well.

The self-help powers-that-be have noted that it's a good rule of thumb to keep goals public, whenever someone decide to start working towards them.

Whether it's running a marathon, or starting a business, or losing x amount of weight, the idea is that your social media presence will help uphold accountability, whether through your followers, or the dreaded (or beloved) memory function/"remember this?" that we all receive in a month or 12 down the line.

The point is: making goals public is a means of accountability toward achieving goals. I follow a fair amount of people, and I'm sure at least 1 of them made their goals public at some point. To that person (or those people), I am very sorry for being a bad follower and not holding you to account.

Just as I'm a follower of some, I'm also followed by others. Some of them are the same people. I still fell for this same strategy, and in a sense, failed by not getting the frequency of content out that I would have liked.

It happens; get up, try again, all that. I had some expectation that making this goal public would have some accountability, but realistically (and from my own experience), I really wasn't expecting it to come from my followers. Which begs the question... if this move of public declaration was going to hold me accountable to my goal, who exactly was going to hold me accountable?

I guess the answer was me. With regards to this project, I was, and still am, the bossman and the worker bee, the driver of my own destiny.

What's the matter? Isn't this ideal? To be the champion of your own destiny, as opposed to completing some other person's dream? With access to the Internet and social media, our current age should be an entrepreneurial-minded person's dream, right?

To answer these questions, I like to start from the beginning, and consider how the questions of "authority" and "power" have changed over each age. Industrialization and the modern age caused a significant change in how we relate to one another, our boss, society at large, and even ourselves. Prior to industrialization, the "boss" was largely the King, Queen, or other individual with "absolute sovereignty" (which is another word for "absolute control").

Punishment for insubordination was largely done so that the one with "absolute sovereignty" could display his or her power, as if to say "don't mess with me." And this display of power was not always pretty. In fact, it was pretty gruesome.

For the rest of us in that world, as long as the vassals got their grain quota and we didn't disturb the peace too badly, we were free to spend our days however we wanted. For all of the other challenges they faced, medieval peasants weren't subject to constant surveillance, which can sound like a relief to modern ears. Such was life in this society of sovereignty.

French philosopher Michel Foucault notes that a shift in the nature of power and punishment happened after the modern age. Instead of the "absolute sovereign" making an example of someone as a demonstration of their power, power was less concentrated at the top-down individual level, and more concentrated at the bottom-up institutional level.

The key example Foucault uses here is, well, prisons. Instead of the gruesome punishment of the insubordinate, the insubordinates were put into prisons, i.e. institutions that didn't really show off the "power of the sovereign" but where the in-charge could keep an eye on them, and perhaps exploit them for labor (or, if not that, just control their movements with disciplinary measures, the prevailing force of authority within this society of discipline). It was also more humane - win-win!

With that said, Foucault notes that prisons weren't the only thing to utilize these new disciplinary measures. Pretty much all institutions within the post-industrial age utilized disciplinary measures, as opposed to "actions of the sovereign" as a means of control. Hospitals, schools, political structures, media structures, churches, and, of course, the factory.

The factory is the default workplace that pops in one's mind when they think of this period. Within the factory, line workers are subject to a few particular actions, repeatedly, for long periods of time. The line workers report to a supervisor, who reports to a manager, who reports to a CEO, who reports to a board, who reports to a shareholder, who reports to all the other shareholders, who reports to the rest of society (given particular contexts), who reports to...

The point is, the authority becomes decentralized into the institution itself (as opposed to existing with one or a few "sovereigns"), yet we still remain accountable to this authority. The authority also permeates more facets of our personal life, resulting in authority governing facets of our lives where, previously, it wasn't. Foucault appropriates Jeremy Bentham's idea of the "panopticon", which, for our purposes, just means "that which is all-seeing, and that which makes its omniscience (all-seeing-ness) known". This "panopticon" is the driving force of the society of discipline.

I'll guess what you're thinking: "Matt, this is all well and good, but... what does this have to do with burnout?"

I'm glad you asked.

In his work "The Burnout Society", German-Korean philosopher Byung Chul-Han notes another type of society that is more prescient especially in the information age - namely, what he calls the society of achievement. To put it simply...

If the society of discipline was governed by a word, that word was "should."

In the society of achievement, that word is "can."

What does this mean?

Han's thought is a descendent of both critical theory (theory that aims to change, as opposed to "traditional theory" that aims to merely explain) and psychoanalysis (which can be thought of as a marriage between psychology and philosophy).

This is relevant because Han's thought pertains largely to terms used in these fields, namely the Same (or Self, which can be thought of as "me") and the Other (which can be thought of as "not me" or "outside of myself or my understanding"). Han also uses the term "positive" to denote "relating to the Same" and "negative" as "relating to the Other."

If this is getting too abstract, Han puts these terms using the example of an immune system. Think of a human body as a "Self" for a second. Say this Self encounters something outside of itself/an Other which is pathological (say, the common cold, or something worse). The immune system of the Self fights off this pathological Other, which can be rightly deemed as an infection. (Just to be clear, this isn't to say all "Others" are necessarily pathological).

All well and good.

But what if the pathology is not negative, but positive? What if the pathology doesn't come from outside us, but within us (or, rather, what we've constructed to be us)? What if the pathology is from the Same or "positive"?

Han refers to these as "infarctions" and relates these as internal issues stemming from too much of the Same, or "excess positivity." This excess positivity can cause infarctions such as depression, anxiety, and... burnout.

To compare the society of discipline to the society of achievement on these terms... the society of discipline is governed negatively ("you shouldn't do that", "you must do this", "you can't do that"), the society of achievement is governed positively ("I can do this!", "I'm going to build a company!", "I'm going to become an influencer!")

In this society of achievement, we're kept freer (at least, appear freer), which raises our productivity, as the impetus for anything we do ultimately rests on us. We've become our own boss and our own worker.

Although, again, what's the issue with this?

One major issue is the obsession with productivity. If you can do something productive, adding to the nation's GDP, adding to your own family bottom line, starting a side gig, getting a big audience... why wouldn't you? Are you lazy, or something?

Even if you're still doing everything right, providing for your family and keeping long-term goals in mind... shouldn't you still be trying to continually capitalize on this?

The failure of the unending upward cycle becomes a failure of the person, and a kind of guilt that they ought to be always working, to chase the almighty dollar. Leisure is put on pause, and, at best, relegated as something we do in order to make us more productive. Why take time off? Why, to recharge for work, of course.

And the best part of this is: we're under the impression that we do all of this completely freely. We're free with reference to the fact that we can freely be as productive as we want. And why wouldn't we? Within this paradigm, that's what freedom is for, right?

To be clear, Han is not some lazy-layaround (he might disagree with that categorization). But in a "free" society where the "freedom" we experience is with reference to how productive we can be... isn't that a bit paradoxical? Should there be a "slacker's rights" movement? To return back to Foucault's idea of the panopticon - this "all-seeing" slavedriver that drove his society of discipline - the panopticon within Han's society of achievement is... ourselves, at least seemingly. That's part of the genius of the society of achievement - when we're our own bosses, we're also our own workers. If the boss is always "on", at least in theory, so, too, is the worker.

And this whole mess is, in theory, why we burnout.

So what can we do about this?

It's a tricky problem to solve, as even Amazon has begun utilizing "doing nothing" with respect to the ultimate end of productivity. How many company webinars have you seen, emphasizing "mindfulness", "gratitude" or "meditation" as means to increase productivity?

Han recommends "contemplation". Which begs the question - what exactly distinguishes contemplation from meditation, as we, the white-collar workers of the West, know it?

That's easy - meditation as promoted by Amazon and company HR departments does so with reference to one's productivity. Contemplation... doesn't. With regard to the engine of "excess positivity" we've discussed earlier, meditation feeds the engine, and contemplation doesn't. Meditation is work, contemplation is play.

And if you're playing the game of the neoliberal achievement society and not having fun (which is why burnout happens)... try switching the game you're playing.

Hopefully this didn't end on too esoteric a note.